The Agentic Galley Drum

• LLM agentic workflows are changing the rhythm of labor in software production.
• Software engineering is the first target for this change, but potential success will cause ripple effects across many other domains of knowledge work.
• The transition from manufacture to industrial production marked an important change in the dictation of the rhythm of labour (as described by Marx in Capital): Up until that point, the rhythm was dictated by humans. With the expansion of the machine as the paradigmatic means of labour and the concentration of labour forces in the factory, it was the machine that started to dictate the rhythm of production: any moment within the day in which the machine is not being used is considered wasteful. Workers started taking shifts and adapting their actions to the needs of the machine.
• We can imagine a similar shift in software engineering. Instead of automations (e.g. CI tasks) being triggered by events controlled by the software engineers, software engineers will be reacting to events generated by LLM agents. We are already being constantly prompted to respond to permission requests and perform code reviews in tasks handled by LLM agents.
• As the agentic paradigm expands, we may be:
  • Waking up on Monday morning having to review 30 pull requests.
  • Constantly reacting to agents’ requests and errands.
  • Having to take shifts so that agent work is not wasted.
  • In general, struggling to keep up with an extraneously imposed rhythm and demands for intensification.